I should also add it's not incumbent on me to explain anything to you. I speak from my own personal experience and what I observe.

All that is true. Do you know that I have never broken one law of my land. No speeding tickets, no going through red lights, no stealing, no tax evasion, nothing. I am upfront and honest in all my dealings with everyone I know and everyone around me.

In my 54 years here on earth the only time I have ever waivered once from my moral code was when I had an 18 month A.

And I do the same.

Because it is my specific situation it is all I can speak from. That does NOT make it all about me. It is all I know. So what if my situation is not the norm. It's the only situation I know. I CANNOT speak for other people. I can only speak for myself. As can anyone else on this board. Your situation is unique to you. That doesn't make it all about you.

Everyone has their own story and they tell it. If it doesn't fit with other people's experience well, there you go. It is MY experience. I don't fit with a lot of things here. I'm not American for a start. My cultural background is exceptionally and extremely different.

Jen:

Let's just leave it at this...

Your A/OM sitch was HIGHLY ATYPICAL
You have had one significant moral failure
Most of us here would consider it sadly to be far more impeaching than all the traffic violations & financial improprieties you mentioned COMBINED
None of us are perfect for sure
You have done the right thing in rectifying it and you are to be commended for that

Please understand that when a WS/former-WS posts anything less that what appears to be TRUE REMORSE and FULL RESPONSIBILITY, it is EXTREMELY OFFENSIVE to those of us who have heard all those PAINFUL excuses and justifications before. Sorry, if you feel dumped on...but claiming to have "always loved your H" while you were ripping his heart out for 18+ months messing around with your ex-boyfriend whom you ultimately left because you feared "life would be boring with an engineer" REALLY COMES ACROSS AS INSENSITIVELY LESS-THAN-FULLY-REPENTANT.

Hope you can understand why that might be for the BSs.
God Bless

Very well said.

For Jen it was also twice with the same OM.

Jen - I really do like you but I must say it bugs me when you try and nullify posts setting forth the TYPICAL situation with your a-typical example. Or is it the exception that proves the rule?

The posts here on this thread are pretty typical of the described experiences and thoughts of many if not most BS's.

I understand how that must look that SDCWman.

Trust me when I say that my marriage is happy and wonderful.

I AM fully repentent. I was talking about a time 35 years ago when I made the decision I did - not to marry the OM. It was the correct decision. I don't quite see how making that decision is seen as insensitive. I married a man who complemented me in every way and that was my H. It still is my H.

I take FULL responsibity for my A.

If that is the case BigK, I defer. I DO NOT try and nullify posts. If the generalisations are correct I defer. I DO NOT try to prove that I am an exception. My A was textbook. It wasn't atypical. If the OM had been Joe Blow from the office it would have played out in exactly the same way.

The decision to marry your H instead of the boring-engineer-boyfriend was a legitimate choice that was yours to voluntarily enter into or not.

When you made that commitment, YOU GAVE UP THE RIGHT to ever have engineer-man (or ANY OTHER MAN) in your bed, in your heart, and in your romantic life in any way EVER AGAIN.

Somehow, for 18 months, you illegitimately re-assumed that "right"...saying you "always loved your H" during this time even if (implausible as it is) accurate & true, comes across as a faint attempt at justification. "Well, my affair was wrong, but I loved my H during it" sounds pretty LAME to me. As does your protestations about being "from a different culture" and never have broken the traffic/tax laws as a law-abiding citizen in your country.

I am glad you accept repsonsibility and are repentant. I am glad you are happily married and fully recovered with your H. You deserve credit for restoring your M as does your BH for forgiving and reconciling with you. I wish you both the best and continued bliss.

I also agree with all of this. One of the reasons I find this topic interesting is we seem to be disecting the mindset of adulterers. Somewhere, something snaps. My own feelings in my M that I've described I don't think are completely unusual. Most people have some complain or another of their spouse - not necessarily the same as mine but something. Most people try different things to resolve them through counselling or their own means or whatever. I highly doubt that even the most perfect marriage is completely without problems. The difference is more likely in the solutions.

So now we have these spouses in less than perfect M's who not only break their vows, they do it with the unlikeliest of people around! Am I the only one who is seeing symptoms of some sort of mental illness here? Geez, they treat you for clinical depression with vaguer symptoms than this! They should do a study and hook up a bunch of WS's to electrodes to try and figure out which neurons are misfiring.

Yes! Excellent idea! I think the BSs should be allowed to hook up some of the electrodes!! hee hee

SDCWman,


I know it was posted in the general sense and not meant to offend or as a put down, I just find the author to have very narrow thinking with his views. It was his narrow thinking that was offensive more than anything else. I can take it though.



I think you did perhaps mis-interpret what I was saying. I was not defending my FOM at all. My intent was to present facts which were in contrast to the what the author had stated and nothing more.

I also didn't mean having an advanced degree made it any less disgusting. It is disgusting regardless of the educational background.


Thoughts of our girls and the effects on them were the reason I didn't leave my DH for many years. Both of our parents divorced when we were adults and it was hard. I knew how hard it would be on them.

I decided I would "suck it up" even when our oldest DD would ask me why I stay and let my DH treat me the way he did. (this is not me rewriting history, DH would say the same thing). He was not nice to any of us and would also agree to this. He is so different now than he use to be. Even our girls know it. We have so much peace in our family when there use to be so much tension.

I know I went about things the wrong way and regret doing what I did. Right before my A went physical I sat my DH and told him things needed to change or I was leaving. I expected things to change, but nothing did. I know now that was my fault because I did not communicate to him what I really meant. What I should have said to him was this, "I am attracted to FOM and ready to do something I know I shouldn't. We need to do something drastic with our relationship."

I bet that would have been a very effective wake-up call. I expected him to just mind read what I meant vs what I said. I didn't even say anything close to what I meant, but at the time felt like I did. In my mind I felt like I was giving him one last chance to do something and took his lack of changing to be the green light to go ahead. (how's that for irrational fog thinking).

I don't use anything to justify what I did and own every bit of it. I also know it was issues in me that led me to have an A. I also believe now if I was ever in the same situation I would know the proper way to handle things. My EP's keep me from getting anywhere near that spot, but I know hands down exactly everything I did wrong to find myself in the spot I was.

I'm, too am thankful my DH and I were able to recover and very happy our girls can see what a happy couple looks like and not what they had to see for all the years before we changed our ways.

LC

HYPOTHETICAL QUESTION FOR xWW:

Putting aside the obvious moral transgressions involved here...abandoning your marriage, breaking apart 2 households, grievously wounding 2 ex-spouses, destroying the lives of 2 children, sacrificing your (former) friends & family who loved you, and selling out your character via rampant lies & manipulation...so you could become the 4th-choice-wife of a much older 5th-rate-man who could most generously be described as "not worth a warm bucket of spit"...let me get this straight...
You thought that was a good idea???
Because he "listened" and "paid attention" to you???
Am I missing something here???????????

I will answer your hypothetical question.

At the time, YES.

I read this here quite a while ago. It was posted by Noodle.


One of my DH's favorite sayings is "It does not work to apply rational thinking to irrational behavior."

Tabby, it may not be mental illness, but it sure is a whole lot of irrational thinking.

LC

First an observation. Obviously inflammatory remarks (understandable as the circumstances may make them) are probably why so many WW's do not participate in these discussions.

As for a reply to the intention of the question - LC sums it up very well in the post above mine. You simply can't apply logic to what is very illogical behavior. I have no statistics to back this up, but I'm willing to bet that most WW's in a typical A say the "it just happened" statement because WE have no clue how/why it went that far.

An observation that I've made in my own M and struggling with my A: The WWS can never fully comprehend the amount of damage we've done to the BS - it is truly impossible to understand the depth of the pain we've caused. Conversely, the BS will NEVER understand the illogical behavior that lead up to the WWS' A. For me personally, _I_ don't understand my actions - how could somebody who didn't do what I did possibly understand?

You now perhaps can understand why many WSs come to places like this to gain some perspective. We can't talk to active waywards--they won't talk, are so fogged up they would never tell the truth, and are so completely lacking in self-awareness and lost in self-deception that any conversation would be a futile exercise in utter nonsense. The only sources we have are former-WSs-in-recovery and 3rd party professional therapists (Harley, Pittman, Glass, others).

It is fairly easy to comprehend WS illogical, fog behavior froma purely ACADEMIC point of view--it is based on powerful emotion, faulty assumptions, slippery slopes not rationality, yada, yada. It is VERY DIFFICULT to come to grips with it PERSONALLY & MENTALLY. The all too common WS statement "It just happenned, I just fell in love" makes sense and nonsense at the same time.
Sense: academically it is easy to see how someone could be carried away by their emotion and feel the strong desire to indulge it
Nonsense: still hard to figure how someone could forget about empathy and their own value-system. (i.e. would you ever want someone to do that TO YOU?)



A truer statement was never made.

His "views" have been gained via decades of practice as a psychiatrist and counselor. Sadly, the trends he has noticed in his clientele match up quite well with the personal experiences and observations of most BSs here. The fact that your A took place with an OM whose "resume" is substantially more impressive on paper than most typical affair partners makes your particular past situation the "narrow" exception to the broader rule.


Point taken...thank you


We certainly agree wholeheartedly on that and I salute you for your responsibility and recovery. I would guess that you did not choose your OM as an affair-partner as a "better substitute" or "improvement" for/over your H but more likely because he was physically & emotional "available", provided you much needed attention and affirmation (was "nice" to you), and you happen to know and develop a comfortable rapport with him. If everything else had been exactly the same, but he had been a heavily-tattooed 7-11 clerk with a criminal record & 2 illegitimate kids (instead of an MD), I suspect the result would have been similar. Thus--the emotionally-driven illogicality of waywards & affairs that we have been discussing.



I commend you completely. In fact, your exertions at "communicating" to/with your H, although not as whole-hearted as you admit they could have been, went FAR BEYOND the meager-to-nonexistent efforts most WSs make toward their spouses in that regard. The "green light" analogy you used was excellent and very telling. I suspect that many WSs have no interest in giving up their OP and "green light" themselves to continue advancing the A by falsely saying to themselves:

"He/she knows what is wrong but isn't responding"
"He/she didn't listen when I tried to tell him/her"
"He/she outta know but just doesn't care"

You deserve a great deal of credit for admitting your "issues" and putting the pride we all have aside for the greater good. Certainly your BH needed to have done better in your eyes (understandably) before the A, but you bravely recognized that his mistakes did not justify yours. So many WSs never come to that realization, do so VERY late, or are too stubborn to accept a few simple principles that are paramount here:

No matter how badly your S has messed up, you have made mistakes in the M too
No matter how badly your S has messed up, an A is NEVER justified
Loving actions beget loving feelings, NOT the other way around
Your S cannot meet your EN's unless you ALLOW him/her to
An A is NOT the answer to your M's problems, it is a temporary escape at best
An A is the WS's responsibility; the BS did not "cause" it
The A must end BEFORE you 2 can address the M's & the BS's issues
Your M and your S are "worth it" far more than your A and your OP

You know, I've sought answers to all of these questions too. I think it sometimes just boils down to the WS just has no feelings for their spouse, thinks they have M the wrong person because they aren't "in love," and falls for the OP. When that A doesn't work, many of them wouldn't even consider going back to their spouses because they have no feelings for them. Sadly, they have no regrets, remorse, etc.

Ok, so what point am I trying to make? I don't know. Maybe just that you can analyze it all day but for the WS it's just that simple. They don't want to be M anymore.

I'd like to preface my post by paraphasing Dr. Harley...There are always REASONS, but NEVER any EXCUSES...(I think that was paraphasing...could be exact, not sure! )

In our case, Mr. W and I were both very withdrawn from each other...Neither one meeting the ENs of the other...We did still love each other based upon our years of history, but we were certainly NOT romantically in love with each other...We were BOTH very vulnerable to an affair due to that and also not having proper boundaries with other people...(I know that we were BOTH vulnerable, as Mr. W actually propositioned a staff member of ours while I was out of town once...Thankfully, she was newly engaged and said "no"...Our situation came very close to happening in the reverse...)

At the time of my affair, I was extraordinarily depressed, so much so that I was in the planning stages of suicide...Out of the blue OM contacted me through classmates.com...He was an ex boyfriend that I had dated off and on for 9 years...through high school and college...I'd known him since Jr. High...When he first contacted me, I was flattered *RED FLAG*, I even told Mr. W how flattered that I was...Mr. W knew that we were communicating...and in the beginning things were not inappropriate (other than, NOW, imo it's inappropriate to communicate with any former lover)...I was in the stage of trying to impress him with how incredibly great my life had turned out..."Brag Mode" if you will...Perhaps if the communication would have only been in email that would have worked, he would have retreated, etc...However, we began phone conversations...still just catching up...BUT since the guy had known me since childhood, he said something to me along the lines of "Mrs. W, what happened to that constantly smiling, ever perky girl I once knew? Where did she go? Something is terribly wrong, what is it?" That is when my floodgates opened and I began sharing WAY TOO MUCH...Pouring out my heart, which led to the "what ifs" and "remember whens"...Very dangerous territory...Combustible even...

The reason that people say "it just happened", is because that is what it actually feels like...Upon further examination, however, you can clearly see all of the small choices (movement of boundaries) that were made that lead up to the "big choice", but due to all the small, almost imperceptible, choices being made beforehand, that "big choice" doesn't feel like a choice at all...Oddly, sickly, wrongly, it simply "flows"...

I do understand what Kiwi was saying when she said she still loved her husband...I honestly did too (yes, I realize how very contradictory that sounds...WSs are walking contradictions I think)...I've told this practically a million times here, but while in the affair I told OM, "I can't imagine a world where there is no Mr. & Mrs. W"...I was so conflicted, I can't even begin to describe it...I just knew that it felt so good to finally "feel good" again that I didn't want to let that go...As I'm sure most, if not all WSs do, I did try very hard to demonize Mr. W - how else could I try and justify the unjustifiable? I was so conflicted that I abused Xanax during this time -- took so many that I had large chunks of time that I didn't remember at all -- I totalled my car while high, just a couple of days before I was going to see OM for the first time (long distance affair)...I needed to drowned my conscience...I could not even pray because I KNEW how very wrong what I was doing was in the sight of God...

I think it's important to remember that most WSs do not have an affair AT the BS...Rather they are trying very hard to fill up something that is empty inside them...It is a purely selfish pursuit obviously...

Anyway, SDCWman, I'm not sure if what I've rambled here about our specific situation really answers any of your questions or not...Feel free to ask me any questions that you'd like, and I'll do my best to answer them...Mr. W also posts here and could perhaps answer as well...

Mrs. W

P.S. I'm in full agreement with the Pittman stuff you posted, btw...For sure I did "affair down", was a terrible mother at the time of the affair etc...I think what he says is pretty accurate...of course not everything said will be true for everyone, but I think it's darn close...

You are correct...that is what he says. It is on the infidelity video at MB.com--thanks for posting!


Once again this, albeit extreme, example demonstrates what Pittman wrote about how romantic A's are often fantasy flights of escape from emotional stress, marital or otherwise. My xWW was in hindsight clearly depressed and drinking heavily as well--never told me why--I thought she was stressed about a major work project and just "over-did it" a few times at happy hours.


I have read this story-line over and over. And lived it at the hands of my xWW. It seems SO MANY affairs begin this way--with just a simple unburdening of personal "TMI" and a little attention, empathy, and reciprocation from the OP. Then it is game on...the 2 parties share an intimate "secret" and a powerful emotional connection. The EA is born and starts to soon feel "special". It should come as no surprise that nothing particularly romantically "wonderful" or "attractive" is required in the OP other than a little time and an open ear. The WS is so emotionally vulnerable and needy at this point that they would probably start to fall in love with a Sasquatch if it just listened, smiled, and uttered a few kind words in response.


Yes, the exact quote my xWW wrote me shortly post-D was "I am sorry I didn't talk to you about things. I wasn't looking for a relationship--I was just lonely and down about us and needed companionship." Yes, any social interaction with a member of the opposite sex in which relational information is exchanged is a DATE and married people are not ALLOWED TO DATE. I am sure that all WSs don't even realize that they are on "dates", and dating leads to bonding, and bonding leads to feelings, and feelings lead to sex. It just flows...


Is that the "I love you but I am not in love with you" thing? Sort of like, "I care about you but those ga-ga feelings are directed elsewhere"?


Yeah, I got this stuff too. My WW (a lifelong Christian) dragged her OM (a lifelong disinterested non-believer) with her to church several times. She spent the ENTIRE services bawling her eyes out uncontrollably as she tried to buy "penance" by generously tithing large amounts of $$$ and professing her renewed dedication to her faith. The conflict within is obvious and one just gapes at the hypocritical irony of two co-adulterous lovers attending church together as a "couple"...the absurdity of it had to be self-evident--they quit going after a few months.


I believe you entirely, thank you.


That "Sasquatch" would be a STEP-UP compared to a lot of the OP I have read about on these boards and witnessed in several real-life examples...LOL

Thank you so much, Mrs. W, for your time and your honest insights. So glad to hear that you and Mr. W are doing so well now.